For most of act 1, fights felt reasonably difficult. There were only a few points where I had a tpk. However, between early access and now, that last fight felt like a sharp spike in difficulty.
My first time through, it took me and my wife 2 days to finally cheese it. This time around it still took us 3 or 4 reloads and something I’ll talk about in the spoiler section before we made it.
It seems like you suddenly need to get good at really strategizing or find some extra wrinkle to make it possible. But I’m curious to hear how other folks managed to get through the fight.
Spoilers
I had no idea until today on our third reload that you could recruit the duergar rebels to fight with you against Nere. Suddenly having an entire army of allies to help out really feels like how the fight was intended. It was only through abusing running away to long rest and have Withers res folks that we managed to take everyone on by ourselves before.
I had always figured there was some weirdness in encounter balance and not that I had missed the way the fight is supposed to play out. If someone here managed to take down Nere, his followers, AND the rebels, please let me know how you pulled that insanity off. I can already tell that Act 2 is going to force me to step up my game on the strategy end of things.
Huh, I have no memory of such a fight - my conclusion to Act 1 was a fight against the Githyanki inquisitor (equally fucking hard though, the dice were being hugely unkind to me). Was this in the underdark? I never did go down there for long.
Yes, OP describes a fight in the underdark. I managed to skip it by accident even though that’s the route I took.
God this game has so much replayability, so many optional plot points!
Oh shoot I forgot that there’s other paths now besides the underdark. Wife and I have just been revisiting the early access content.
Honestly the almost immediate beholder and minotaur encounters from one of the entrances left me too terrified to return. Ended up taking the mountain pass instead, and it was beautiful.
I never even saw the beholder this time! Did a little exploring beforehand and by the time I went to the beholder and all the petrified drow, it wasn’t there.
Unfortunately I missed it completely. While exploring Grymforge I accidentally took the boat back to the underdark beach and by the time I returned and fully explored the rest of Grymforge before going to meet Nere he was already dead. I didn’t realise it was on a timer.
After doing the forge stuff I then just went the mountain pass route instead to genocide the githyanki.
Yeah, similar boat, did a couple fights in Grymforge, figured I needed a rest, got a psychic message from Nere in camp, ignored it and rested anyways. Oops. :P On me for not realizing that would have ramifications beyond Nere dying.
I killed all the druegar (a lot of yeeting into oblivion) before fighting nere.
Yeah, same here. Got messed up in my initial fight with him and all his pals, so for my reload I hung out on that wall next to where he was trapped and made them come up to me. Much easier fight that way haha
I had no idea there was a rebel situation and you can get allies during that fight, that’s pretty neat
I dunno what I did exactly, but by the time I got there, Nere was already dead. I didn’t have a big fight at the end of act 1.
I made the mistake of leaving the area without resolving that situation, and when I came back the fight was over. lol.
spoiler
It took me ages to figure out how to navigate that location, and so I left and returned. But I left after I had spoken to Nere through the cave-in. Then when I returned a little while later the Duergar’s had already killed Nere and executed all the gnomes. Oops. ::: spoiler
Is this the fight that happens in the Harper’s little camp? I first thought due to how many dudes it kept spawning every turn and how I couldn’t flee from it, I was supposed to lose, but no. Dying there just gives game over. 😬
I’ve been everywhere else, obtained every magical item (and only fed like 3 to Gale), and should have gotten as much XP as possible and this fight still seems impossible or that I was supposed to have a McMuffin to help win it that for whatever reason I don’t. Plus, I killed that winged dude in 2 hits right off the bat, but this just triggered him to knock out the woman and take off, which made me start to question how this game handled script triggers because it’s so jarring to complete one action, and then have a cutscene trigger showing something else happening.
No, this was if you went down to the underdark. I forgot there were other options for where to go when i made the post. I’m excited to do another playhthrough and check that route out though, it seems intriguing.
The fight is doable. A Control Wizard/Sorc, Repelling Blast Warlock, or Tavern Brawler Barbarian/Stronk/Fighter/Druid make pretty short work of it by tossing all but 4 (Nere, Thrinn, the Merchant, and the Archer on the high ground) into the lava or off the stage.
Fireball-Quickened Fireball on the first turn takes out a lot of the duergar, after that it was just mopping up.
I used a crooked wand of fireball I found for pretty similar results, evens the playing field quite a bit at the cost of some healing afterwards
I tried that fight a couple times before giving up on the quest because I already had another route to Moonrise. I expect recruiting allies is necessary because fighting that many duergar is mega difficult
Spoilers
If you let Nere kill the gnomes and Captain Thrinn, you can agree to fight on his side (to the disapproval of some companions), but the fight is still ridiculously hard.
It’s very cool that there’s now a lot more flexibility to how you can approach these situations compared to what we had in EA. I’m excited to get fully past act 1 so that I’m not going off of how EA conditioned me to approach everything
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!I… Long rested and everyone was ded!<
I did not get the impression you had to fight him at all, though I chose to do so knowing I was in league with the duregar. Sounds like you deliberately picked a fight with a guy that had a lot more friends than you — I would kind of expect that to be hard.
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!Is this how spoilers work here?!< Please ignore
